News Corp's WSJ seeing cuts, shifting resources

The Wall Street Journal and its Dow Jones parent announced Thursday an unspecified number of job cuts and the closing of some foreign bureaus as they shift resources into digital.

A memo to staff from Gerard Baker, editor-in-chief at the Journal and Dow Jones, offered no specific numbers, but said a reorganization would mean "reductions in staff and elimination of certain positions" to adapt to a media landscape which "continues to change at a dizzying pace."

The memo obtained by AFP said that along with those cuts, "we will be adding dozens more jobs in the critical areas of business, finance, technology, markets and global economics."

The group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, will hire more people in video, audience data and analytics; social media engagement and other areas important for digital operations, according to the memo which did not indicate the net impact on jobs.

Baker said in the memo that "this necessary restructuring will leave us a somewhat smaller but much more focused newsroom."

According to an article in the Journal, more than 100 jobs may be eliminated in the reorganization.

"A few dozen positions" were being cut Thursday, with more coming in the coming weeks and months, according to a source cited in the article who added that the total number of layoffs could be "well over 100."

Baker said that news bureaus in Helsinki and Prague would be closed and other offices in Europe and Asia would be reduced in size.

Also being closing is the Bahasa Indonesia website.

"We will reduce significantly the amount of output we do that generates relatively little traffic or subscribers," Baker said in the memo.

"That means a sharp reduction in the number of non-core blogs we do."

In New York, the team covering small business will be eliminated and others will be scaled back or consolidated.

Baker said that new investments will allow for "a further radical upgrade in our digital capabilities" that will aim for improvements in mobile and social media.

"We need to become more engaging visually," he said. "And we need to become much more savvy about our audience, using the availability of data to connect better with them."